Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/215

 worker, ’cause she only needs them when she goes out to find her lover, or maybe a few times more when she has a great hive full of one hundred and twenty pounds of honey and so many bees they are in each other’s way. So, when she gets everything ready, she tells part of them to come with her to found a new hive, and leaves the others to refill the old hive after the Bee Master takes his share of the honey.

“The way a Queen comes to be a Queen, is this way: In a little cell all fixed up for it, the Queen bee of a hive puts an egg and she tells the workers ‘I want this egg to be a Queen.’ Then the workers get busy and make the royal jelly. That’s another thing the people who write the bee books haven’t found out. They don’t know just what royal jelly is or how it is made. But the workers know. God showed ’em how when He made ’em. So they make the royal jelly and they feed it to what comes from the egg that the Queen said should be another Queen. It grows to be a white nymph, and when a white nymph is ready to fly, it is a young Queen. With different food they feed what comes from each egg in each different cell and out of each cell there comes the thing that the Queen says she wants to come. For fear something might happen to a Queen, ’cause there can’t any hive get along without a Queen, she lays a whole lot of eggs that she says she wants made into Queens and then she lays quite a number for males and some for nurses and thousands and thousands for workers. Remember this: Bees make four different kinds of cells.